Sebastian Montes writes:
Montgomery County’s newest employment center for day-laborers opened for business Monday with a strong turnout, a handful of hires and no community protest.
By the time the center closed Monday afternoon, four of 50 workers gathered had found work with two plumbing contractors. County officials and Casa of Maryland, the immigrant advocacy group chosen to run the center, attributed the slow start to the day’s cold and blustery weather.
Or, it could just be par for the course.
Update: Steve Hendrix of the Washington Post has a story in today’s Metro section, headlined Day-Labor Site Opens in Gaithersburg:
A stormy three-year effort to establish a sanctioned gathering place for job-seeking day laborers in Gaithersburg came to an apparently tranquil end yesterday in a double-wide trailer just outside city limits.
Other than the general tone of “gosh, it’s wonderful that these illegal workers don’t have to stand out in the parking lots of local 7-Elevens anymore”:
“It’s much better here than outside,” said Jose Mendez, a 21-year-old from El Salvador who has been working illegally as a painter in the country for more than four years. “This is a comfortable place. The 7-Eleven can be dangerous.”
and “mean ol’ Gaithersburg”:
The opening capped a prolonged, unsuccessful effort by Gaithersburg to find a location for the center. This year, County Executive Isiah Leggett bypassed the city government and provided a chunk of county land off of Shady Grove Road as a site.
the Post gets most of it pretty much right, even this:
But city officials say they were turned down by more than 30 landlords in their search for a site, and county officials worried that political pressures would stymie the effort.
The Post article also correctly states the current status of Gaithersburg’s anti-solicitation ordinance, and quotes Stephen Schreiman as stating that the Minutemen plan to “concentrate on possible legal and political challenges” rather than protests at and monitoring of the site.